Announced on Tuesday, SAP Hana Vora is an in-memory query engine that taps the Apache Spark execution framework to deliver interactive analytics on Hadoop.

By extending Hana's reach to include distributed data in the Hadoop ecosystem, the tool is designed to help data scientists and developers combine corporate and external data in their analyses. That, in turn, means that incoming data from customers, partners and smart devices can be integrated with that from internal enterprise processes, giving companies better context with which to make decisions, SAP said.

Hana Vora will be particularly useful for organizations that need to analyze large volumes of data in the context of business processes, SAP said, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and manufacturing.

SAP Hana Vora will be released to customers later this month with three licensing options, ranging from a free developer edition to an enterprise version with full SAP support.

Also on Tuesday, SAP revealed new details about several services planned for the Hana Cloud Platform.

SAP Hana Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, which was originally announced at the company's Sapphire Now user conference in May, is scheduled to be generally available starting in late September. It will give customers and partners capabilities such as device management, device data connectivity and bi-directional device data synchronization.

Other new Hana services focus on collaboration, mobile security and tax computation.

Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers enterprise software in all its forms, with an emphasis on cloud computing, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence.